FIGURES OF SPEECH Tough question Sperber & Wilson suggested - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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FIGURES OF SPEECH

STEPHEN SCHIFFER GO FIGURE, LONDON 2013

OUTLINE

• Gricean model of figures of speech
• Tough question
• Sperber & Wilson suggested answer
• Problems
• The correct (roughly Davidsonian)

model

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THE GRICEAN MODEL

• a. Speaker-meaning
• What S means in “uttering” x
• supervenes on intentions with which S uttered

x

• not determined even in part by meaning of x

(or whether x has meaning)

• Role of x

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GRICEAN MODEL (2)

• b. Expression-meaning
• σ: <A, Ψ>
• ‘Is she amusing?’: <?, xf is amusing at tu>
• ‘She’s amusing.’: <⊦, xf is amusing at tu>
• c. Saying/speaking literally
• S said p in uttering σ = S meant p in uttering σ &

p “fits” the meaning of σ

• S spoke literally in uttering assertoric sentence σ

= for some p, S said p in uttering σ 5

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GRICEAN MODEL (3)

• d. Implicature
• S “implicated” p in uttering σ ≈ S meant

but didn’t say p in uttering σ

• Any proposition that can be meant can in

principle be said

• Must have truth conditions
• Proposition that colorless green ideas sleep

furiously is false

• Needn’t be “paraphrasable”

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GRICEAN MODEL (4)

Mistakes to be avoided

“Grice tended to take for granted … that when someone uses language to communicate, she is presumed to express her meaning literally. It can then be assumed by default that the literal linguistic meaning of the utterance is … the explicit part of her meaning (Grice’s what is said), with only the implicit part (Grice’s implicatures) left to be inferred”

—Sperber & Wilson, “A Deflationary Account of Metaphors”

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GRICEAN MODEL (5)

BUT

• No “presumption” or “norm” of literalness
• Meaning of sentence almost never what’s

said

• For Gricean, ALL speaker-meaning is

inferred

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GRICEAN MODEL (5)

• e. Figures of speech are ways of

generating implicatures

• Irony: ‘Jane is a fine friend’
• Metaphor: ‘You are the cream in my

coffee’

• Meiosis: ‘He was a little intoxicated’
• Hyperbole: ‘He has to walk around in the

shower to get wet’

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GRICEAN MODEL (6)

• f. Corollaries
• No such thing as “figurative meaning” of

expression type

• No proposition is per se a “figurative

meaning”

• Whatever proposition S means when

speaking figuratively could in principle be said 10

TOUGH QUESTION

How does model apply to “The Fog”?

The fog comes

• n little cat feet.

It sits looking

• ver harbor and city
• n silent haunches

and then moves on.

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ANSWER?

… suggested by Sperber & Wilson’s “A Deflationary Account of Metaphor”

• S weakly means p in uttering σ ≈ for some class of

propositions K, S M-intends H to consider some proposition or propositions of kind K, where any K proposition is as good as any other

• E.g. in uttering ‘George Eliot was a woman’ S intends

there to be a concept C such that 1) C entails that GE was a 19th Century English novelist 2) H believes that C was a woman

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ANSWER? (2)

• Definition of weakly-meaning satisfied if H

believes that the author of Daniel Deronda was a woman, even if S never heard of Daniel Deronda

• Mistake to speak of “weakly intending” here
• But can read definition as stipulative
• S w-implicates p in uttering x ≈ in uttering x

S w-means p but doesn’t w-say p

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ANSWER? (3)

For any concept C of any property φ such that φ is (i) suggested by ‘on little feet’ & (ii) possibly shared by cat movements and fog movements, the poet in writing ‘The fog comes/

• n little cat feet’ w-implicated that

the fog comes in way C

• That’s what make sentence a metaphor

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ANSWER? (4)

Applies also to “poetic effects” achieved in literal use of language

On a leafless bough A crow is perched— The autumn dusk.

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PROBLEMS

Consider

• “… the rooks in the college garden/Like agile babies still

speak the language of feeling…” (W. H. Auden, “Oxford”)

• “Its edges foam'd with amethyst and rose,/Withers once more

the old blue flower of day…” (AE, “The Great Breath”) a. We have no sense of any propositions ascribing properties to rooks or days that Auden or AE w-mean

• b. “Poetic effects” are gestalt affective responses, and there are

no properties such that the “poetic effects” these figures might have on us can be identified with thinking of rooks or days having those properties

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PROBLEMS (2)

• c. While poets intend their figures of speech to

resonate affectively with their readers, there isn’t even a particular vague response they’re going for in all readers

• Sometimes poet’s just hoping there’s something—

anything!—in their words to resonate Hope is the thing with feathers That tickles imploring souls, And sings the words forgotten in desolate lascivious bowls (Emile Dickinson, “Hope”)

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PROBLEMS (3)

• d. Likewise for Sandburg’s poem and

Bashō’s haiku: w-implicating has nothing to do with the effectiveness

• f good figures of speech

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THE CORRECT MODEL

… is more or less what Davidson proposed in “What Metaphors Mean” (1978)

“When I die, I want to die like my grandfather did: peacefully in his sleep—not screaming hysterically like the passengers in the car he was driving.”

• One telling this joke might be doing so to

implicate some proposition, but that has nothing to do with the joke qua joke

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CORRECT MODEL (2)

• The words that express the joke have no meaning
• ther than their literal meaning in the language
• And there’s no proposition such that the joke

consists in the teller’s implicating that proposition

• To understand a joke is to “get” it, or know what

there is that one’s supposed to get about it

• Not “getting” a joke = not seeing what’s supposed to be

funny about it; it’s not failing to realize that the teller meant some proposition

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CORRECT MODEL (3)

• There might be propositions one has to grasp to get

a joke, but they aren’t propositions implicated or expressed by the joke

Heisenberg went for a drive and got stopped by a traffic cop. The cop asked, "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know where I am."

• Jokes aren’t “paraphrasable” because

understanding them doesn’t consist in implicated propositions one could even try to express in other words 21

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CORRECT MODEL (4)

• Same is true, mutatis mutandis, of

effective figures of speech

• Sometimes “getting” a figure of speech =

“getting” the joke contained in it "Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in

• love. I'd stepped in it a few times."


(Rita Rudner)

• Not all “figures of speech” equal as regards

the correct model

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REMAINING QUESTIONS

• How can we precisely characterize

affective responses to good figures of speech?

• How do metaphors et al work to

achieve those responses?

• Analogous questions re jokes
• Not clearly questions for philosophers

to answer

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FINAL REMARKS

… based on “Workshop Overview”

Bearing of figures of speech on

• Q. semantics of propositional-attitude

reports?

• A. None, subject to small qualification
• “Modes of presentation”

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FINAL REMARKS (2)

Bearing of figures of speech on

• Q. on semantics/pragmatics distinction

—is type of meaning figures of speech have a matter of “saying” or “implicating”

• A. None—they don’t have “meaning” in

relevant respect

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